Tracking Swine Flu Worldwide – Where and How, Plus Data

Topic

Just about everywhere you go there’s something in the news about swine flu, and so naturally, when I first heard about it, I waited for The New York Times to put up a graphic. That was the first one. Here’s the second (above).

Is it me or are bubble plots overlaid on maps misleading? The size of the circles don’t convey anything when the regions they represent (states, countries) are of different area size or, especially, population density. It’s especially confusing when the circles cross the area’s boundaries (Mexico’s bubble reaches into Oklahoma). Wouldn’t it be better to just color-code the affected regions by frequency (e.g., darker color), and perhaps, in this case, normalize the counts to population density? I suppose that map-overlaid bubble plots might be more useful when looking at component areas of comparable sizes or populations densities, such as cities or counties, but that’s also misleading given how varied population densities are in different regions.

I generally like the bubble plots visually. But in this case it is confusing when the circles overlap other regions. And what happens as the cases grow? the scale will have to change or the circles will encompass the whole map and that might be confusing.

I put up some swine flu tracking charts myself and plan to update these daily. Not nearly pretty enough but I think they convey the right information in an intuitive way. I will try to work on the format a bit tonight when I update it and perhaps come up with a combined chart. Let me know what you think.